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What, then, we have to ask, is the constant element in the
first three entities? What is it that identifies them with their
inherent Substance?
Is it the capacity to serve as a base? But Matter, we maintain,
serves as the base and seat of Form: Form, thus, will be excluded
from the category of Substance. Again, the Composite is the base
and seat of attributes: hence, Form combined with Matter will be
the basic ground of Composites, or at any rate of all posteriors
of the Composite- Quantity, Quality, Motion, and the rest.
But perhaps we may think Substance validly defined as that which
is not predicated of anything else. White and black are
predicated of an object having one or other of these qualities;
double presupposes something distinct from itself- we refer not
to the half, but to the length of wood of which doubleness is
affirmed. father qua father is a predicate; knowledge is
predicated of the subject in whom the knowledge exists; space is
the limit of something, time the measure of something. Fire, on
the other hand, is predicated of nothing; wood as such is
predicated of nothing; and so with man, Socrates, and the
composite substance in general.
Equally the Substantial Form is never a predicate, since it never
acts as a modification of anything. Form is not an attribute of
Matter hence, is not predicable of Matter it is simply a
constituent of the Couplement. On the other hand, the Form of a
man is not different from the man himself [and so does not
"modify" the Couplement].
Matter, similarly, is part of a whole, and belongs to something
else only as to a whole and not as to a separate thing of which
it is predicated. White, on the contrary, essentially belongs to
something distinct from itself.
We conclude that nothing belonging to something else and
predicated of it can be Substance. Substance is that which
belongs essentially to itself, or, in so far as it is a part of
the differentiated object, serves only to complete the Composite.
Each or either part of the Composite belongs to itself, and is
only affirmed of the Composite in a special sense: only qua part
of the whole is it predicated of something else; qua individual
it is never in its essential nature predicated of an external.
It may be claimed as a common element in Matter, Form and the
Couplement that they are all substrates. But the mode in which
Matter is the substrate of Form is different from that in which
Form and the Couplement are substrates of their modifications.
And is it strictly true to say that Matter is the substrate of
Form? Form is rather the completion which Matter's nature as pure
potentiality demands.
Moreover, Form cannot be said to reside in Matter [as in a
substrate]. When one thing combines with another to form a unity,
the one does not reside in the other; both alike are substrates
of a third: thus, Man [the Form] and a man [the Composite] are
substrates of their experiences, and are prior to their
activities and consequents.
Substance, then, is that from which all other things proceed and
to which they owe their existence; it is the centre of passivity
and the source of action.
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